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Masters of Scale
Masters of Scale
Surprising Truths from the World's Most Successful Entrepreneurs
What can you learn from a Silicon Valley legend and a pantheon of iconic leaders? The key to scaling a successful business isn’t talent, network, or strategy. It’s an entrepreneurial...
What can you learn from a Silicon Valley legend and a pantheon of iconic leaders? The key to scaling a successful business isn’t talent, network, or strategy. It’s an entrepreneurial...
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Due to publisher restrictions, your digital library cannot purchase additional copies of this title. We apologize if there is a long holds list. You may want to see if other editions of this title are available from your digital library instead.
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What can you learn from a Silicon Valley legend and a pantheon of iconic leaders? The key to scaling a successful business isn’t talent, network, or strategy. It’s an entrepreneurial mindset—and that mindset can be cultivated.
“If you’re scaling a company—or if you just love a well-told story—this is a book to savor.”—Robert Iger, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Ride of a Lifetime
Behind the scenes in Silicon Valley, Reid Hoffman (founder of LinkedIn, investor at Greylock) is a sought-after adviser to heads of companies and heads of state. On each episode of his podcast, Masters of Scale, he sits down with a guest from an all-star list of visionary founders and leaders, digging into the surprising strategies that power their company’s growth. In this book, he draws on their most riveting, revealing stories—as well as his own experience as a founder and investor—to distill the secrets behind the most extraordinary success stories of our times.
Here, Hoffman teams up with Masters of Scale’s executive producers to offer a rare window into the entrepreneurial mind, sharing hard-won wisdom from leaders of iconic companies (including Apple, Nike, Netflix, Spotify, Starbucks, Google, Instagram, and Microsoft) as well as the bold, disruptive startups (such as 23andMe, TaskRabbit, Black List, and Walker & Co.) that are solving the problems of the twenty-first century.
Through vivid storytelling and incisive analysis, Masters of Scale distills their collective insights into a set of counterintuitive principles that anyone can use. How do you find a winning idea and turn it into a scalable venture? What can you learn from a “squirmy no”? When should you stop listening to your customers? Which fires should you put out right away, and which should you let burn? And can you really make money while making the world a better place? (Answer: Yes. But you have to keep your profits and values aligned.)
Based on more than a hundred interviews and including a wealth of new material never aired on the podcast, this unique insider’s guide will inspire you to reimagine how you do business today.
Excerpts-
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From the book
1
Getting to No
When she first pitched her idea for a new kind of career development website to investors, Kathryn Minshew was turned down 148 times . . . not that she was counting.
“There were literally days where I had a ‘No’ over breakfast, a ‘No’ over a 10:30 a.m. coffee, a ‘No’ over lunch,” Kathryn says. And the “Nos” kept coming: “Disinterest at 2 p.m. Someone who left the meeting early at 4. And then I would go to drinks and feel like I was being laughed out of the room.
“And when we finally raised our seed round, I went back and counted. It was both painful and gratifying at the same time—looking at all those names, and thinking, I remember that no. I remember that no. I remember that no. And they sting; every one stings.”
Kathryn is cofounder and CEO of The Muse, and her idea sprang—as so many great entrepreneurial ideas do—from her own experience. Kathryn had spent her youth dreaming of a career in international relations. Secret Agent Minshew! But after a stint with the U.S. embassy in Cyprus she realized her foreign service fantasy didn’t match the reality of the work. So she took a job as a consultant with McKinsey & Company and spent three years in their New York office. When it was time to move on again with her career, she found the experience disappointing—and dehumanizing.
“It wasn’t uncommon to type in a keyword on a job-listing site like Monster.com and get 5,724 results—and they all looked functionally identical to each other. I just felt, for someone starting out in their career, that there has to be a better experience,” Kathryn says.
So she started brainstorming with Alex Cavoulacos, a former colleague from McKinsey—and her future cofounder. They asked themselves: “What if you built a career site that put the individual at the center of that experience? And what if you allowed them to see inside offices before they applied to a company? What if you connected them with experts who could help them understand—How do you negotiate a salary? How do you manage someone for the first time?—all of those career questions that if you’re lucky a mentor or a boss teaches you.”
The more they shared their own experiences and envisioned what they might create, the clearer the opportunity became. “After a couple of long nights at the whiteboard batting this idea around, we became convinced that there was an opportunity to create a trusted, beloved, personalized career destination really focusing on the advice that early-stage professionals need,” Kathryn says.
Kathryn and Alex had a clear vision for the role The Muse could play in users’ lives. But not everyone could see what they were seeing.
“When I started pitching to investors, I ran into a couple of big problems,” Kathryn says. “The first is that most investors don’t match the user archetype that our product was built for. When you think about the classic venture capitalist, they often have been traditionally successful in their career, went to a top school, worked in banking or private equity. They usually get jobs through a very comfortable, well-developed network. And that’s great. But that’s not necessarily the case for everyone. So we were pitching this site and this concept to a demographic that looked at me with confusion.”
The second problem she encountered: complacency with the status quo. “We ran into a lot of people who were unable to see past the current paradigm and the way...
About the Author-
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Reid Hoffman is the co-founder of LinkedIn, a partner at Greylock, and widely viewed as one of the most successful investors of all time. A founding board member of PayPal, he is now a board member at Microsoft as well as other companies and nonprofits. He’s the host of WaitWhat’s award-winning podcast Masters of Scale podcast and the bestselling author of The Startup of You, The Alliance, and Blitzscaling.
June Cohen and Deron Triff are the executive producers of the podcast Masters of Scale and co founders of WaitWhat, the media company behind the hit podcasts Masters of Scale, Meditative Story, and Spark & Fire. Previously, they led TED’s media enterprise, growing TED Talks from its initial concept to an audience of 1 billion
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